Bridges to Nowhere

On March 15, a bridge collapsed in Florida, crushing several people to death. The bridge was being constructed as a joint effort of Florida International University and various government agencies, who paid for it. News reports indicated the possibility that some of those involved had rushed the project, failed to supervise it properly, or chosen the wrong firms to undertake it. I don’t know whether Mark Rosenberg, president of the university, had any of that in mind when he issued a statement about the disaster, but here’s a newspaper report on his statement:

Rosenberg [said] in a video shared on Twitter Friday [the day after the accident] that the “tragic accident of the bridge collapse stuns us, saddens us.”

“The bridge was about collaboration, about neighborliness, about doing the right thing,” he said.

“But today we are sad and all we can do is promise a very thorough investigation in getting to the bottom of this and mourn those who we have lost.”

I have four things to say about Rosenberg’s comments.

On occasions like this, old-fashioned college presidents would issue dignified statements, in writing. Rosenberg leaped to tweet a video.

Mark Rosenberg, PhD, doesn’t know the difference between “who” and “whom” — not when facing such a linguistic puzzle as an embedded clause. Just turn it around, Dr. Rosenberg. Would you say, “We have lost who?” Maybe you would.

Whom, exactly, had Rosenberg lost and was mourning? I have enough trouble picturing public officials kneeling by their beds, rapt in thoughts and prayers for people they don’t know and never heard of. What shall I do with the claim that such people are a personal loss for whom officials are donning the black bands of mourning? Rosenberg should have stopped with the simple and incontestable “today we are sad.”

But here’s the worst problem: “The bridge was about collaboration, about neighborliness, about doing the right thing,” Are there any situations in which PC lingo won’t come barging through the door? A bridge is not about anything except getting people to the other side. A bridge may acquire some kind of symbolism, but the taxpayers of the United States didn’t pay 10 or 15 million dollars to construct a monument to collaboration, neighborliness, or doing the right thing. They paid that money so that students could cross Tamiami Trail from FIU to their homes in Sweetwater. This was not the Golden Gate Bridge or the Rainbow Bridge in Das Rheingold. It was a simple, ugly, concrete, utilitarian structure. The university was not being neighborly; it was assisting its own students (with other people’s money, naturally). And if it was collaborating, it was doing so in order to cadge some money from the government. As for doing the right thing, nobody sets out to do the wrong thing, except perhaps in Spike Lee movies.

Rosenberg’s symbol-mongering continued in an interview with an uncritical New York Times:

“This was a good project,” Dr. Rosenberg said Friday. “This was a project that spoke to our desire to build bridges. When the board hired me, I told them, ‘If you give me a pile of rocks, I’m going to build a bridge, not a wall.’ This was about neighborliness and collaboration.”

We see, however, that if you give him a pile of rocks, you’ll end up with a pile of rocks — rhetorically as well as literally.

This was not the Golden Gate Bridge or the Rainbow Bridge in Das Rheingold. It was a simple, ugly, concrete, utilitarian structure.

From Rosenberg’s lofty musings there’s a steep descent to the Death Valley of Hillary Clinton’s latest attempts to explain why she lost the election and deserved, of course, to have won it. On her recent visit to India she took occasion to insult the 52% of American “white” women who voted against her, claiming that their menfolk told them how to vote, so they voted that way. But what especially interested me was the weird mélange of PC and plutocracy that characterized her distinction between places that voted for her and places that voted against:

I won the places that represent two-thirds of America's gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.

One of Clinton’s ideas, if that’s the right word for them, is that diverse populations are wealthier than non-diverse ones, and that their wealth is somehow an effect of their diversity. Since she never defines her terms, one must suppose that diverse means non-“white.” She must, therefore, believe that people in East Los Angeles and South Chicago are really good at hiding their wealth: they don’t seem as prosperous as people in Beverly Hills and the Chicago Gold Coast, but they must be wealthy, because they voted for her. So much for Clinton’s grasp of the problem of income inequality, much advertised by her and her party, when it suits them. Her grasp of psychology is almost as good. Some of her most fervent support came from impoverished inner cities and from the Washington suburbs, which are chock-full of government bureaucrats. These communities supported her because they are dynamic, optimistic, and moving forward.

If you give him a pile of rocks, you’ll end up with a pile of rocks — rhetorically as well as literally.

Clinton divulged another idea, and this is one with few competitors in the realm of politically repulsive notions. I refer to the idea that the better population, the more upright and moral and truth-seeking and noble and deservedly optimistic population, is the one that has wealth. I suppose that Clinton ought to know, because she and her husband (who obviously tells her what to do) have amassed, from a lifetime of selfless public service, a fortune worthy of the Arabian Nights. No country bumpkins are these noble sophist-solons. The fabled wealth of their supporters often derives from similarly political sources: government contracts, government-assisted industries, and lucrative government employment, as in those Washington suburbs. There is barely a state capital in the country that doesn’t have higher household incomes than the rest of the state, or that failed to vote for Hillary.

But if you think that the urban plutocrats who use their votes and influence to ruin the schools, bankrupt the middle class, spread crime and welfare dependency through every promising community, and deny peaceful citizens the right to self-defense — if you think these people are wiser and nobler than a single mother waiting tables in Kansas City, you have disqualified yourself not only from public office but also from public respect. And that’s exactly what Hillary Clinton has done.

Descending still further on the trail of the self-disqualified, we arrive at Andrew (“Andy”) McCabe, former second banana at the FBI. When this gentleman got fired for leaking and lying, he released a long, turgid, thoroughly lawyered-up declaration about various things, including the offenses charged against him by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General. It’s the kind of statement that’s meant to sound childishly simple, but even a child could see that it’s written to be impenetrable. It doesn’t make you wonder how such a smart, caring person could possibly have been fired from his job; it makes you wonder (once more) how stupid one needs to be to qualify for a leadership position in government.

There is barely a state capital in the country that doesn’t have higher household incomes than the rest of the state, or that failed to vote for Hillary.

Here’s a passage; I’ll inject some comments.

The OIG investigation has focused on information I chose to share with a reporter through my public affairs officer and a legal counselor. As Deputy Director, I was one of only a few people who had the authority to do that. It was not a secret, it took place over several days, and others, including the Director, were aware of the interaction with the reporter. [McCabe never says what the information was or to whom it was given. If it wasn’t secret, what is it? But his purpose is to implicate as many other people as possible. He proves, however, that his unethical action was no accident; it was determined and systematic. He must have provided one hell of a lot of information “over several days.”] It was the type of exchange with the media that the Deputy Director oversees several times per week. [The plain word for this kind of “exchange” — and by the way, what was given in return? — is “leak.”] In fact, it was the same type of work [Work? Is leaking a job?] that I continued to do under Director Wray, at his request. [An attempt to implicate the current boss. But notice the obvious but unanswered question: What exactly were you exchanging?] The investigation subsequently focused on who [Ever hear of the word “whom”?] I talked to, when I talked to them, and so forth. During these inquiries, I answered questions truthfully and as accurately as I could amidst the chaos that surrounded me. [He had no role in generating that chaos.] And when I thought my answers were misunderstood, I contacted investigators to correct them. [Give us an example. Maybe we’ll start to imagine something other than “I lied, and then I tried to spin my lies.”]

Of course, McCabe’s statement castigated Trump for saying that he should be fired and denied the pension he had earned by his monumental “20 years of service.” I suggest that those 20 years should be regarded as their own reward, since the servant thinks so highly of their moral value.

Another person who has been unwittingly (to use a favorite term of James Clapper, former director of national intelligence) revealing that he wasn’t qualified for his job is John Brennan, former director of the CIA. Brennan has been making such revelations for quite a while. In December he flew off the handle at Trump’s odd desire to unfriend nations who voted against the US in the UN. Trump, he said, “expects blind loyalty and subservience from everyone — qualities usually found in narcissistic, vengeful autocrats.” While it’s refreshing to find that the former chief of the nation’s army of spooks is so concerned about the welfare of countries he used to spy on, his zeal betrayed him into the ridiculous error of calling blind loyalty and subservience a set of qualities usually found in autocrats. Oh, isn’t that what he meant? But that’s what he wrote. He also accused Trump’s 2016 campaign of being on “a treasonous path,” apparently for being too friendly to certain foreign nations.

Those 20 years of service should be regarded as their own reward, since the servant thinks so highly of their moral value.

If the former head of the CIA is this loose with language, it’s not surprising that he should have gone all out in denouncing Trump for the firing of McCabe, his colleague at the FBI. Brennan spat a tweet at Trump, as follows:

When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America . . . America will triumph over you.

There are arguments to be made both for and against Trump’s conduct, in many areas, but his most obvious defense will be, “Look what I had to deal with” — meaning people like Brennan, whose tin-pot j’accuse can only confirm most people’s suspicions about government spies. He is a man whose instinctive response to opposition is to indicate that he knows something that he can use to get you. If a person like that can threaten the president so automatically and transparently, what was he willing to do to people who were not president?

Yet this is precisely the quality that inspired former UN Ambassador Samantha Power to tweet, as a compliment to the former spymaster:

Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan.

Hey, ya lug. You tryin’ tuh piss off duh boss? You know what happens tuh people that piss off duh boss?

Thus encouraged, Brennan has continued to make himself look like a gangster, going on TV to say that Vladimir Putin “may have something” on Trump.

If we are going to have an FBI or a CIA or a DOJ, I presume it should be run by people of discretion and courage, people who are bold enough to denounce any crimes they uncover by people in the government, but are wise enough to know that they themselves are not the government. This is what the McCabes and Comeys and Brennans and Clappers and Strzoks and Ohrs, geniuses that they are, failed to understand. Like Hillary Clinton, they thought they were the government, having achieved that status by virtue of their superior intelligence and nobility. They then proceeded to sneak their way into higher and higher levels of power. Then it turned out that their nobility was nothing but self-righteousness, and their intelligence was nonexistent.

Trump treats truths and falsehoods in the same way, because he can’t tell the difference.

If there’s a way of being brutally disingenuous, Trump’s enemies have found it. Trump himself is an expert at being brutally ingenuous. The truths he enunciates are blurted out and kicked around, in the way a child finds a football and kicks it into the lamp. He treats falsehoods in the same way, because he can’t tell the difference. Lately he’s been touting a proposal to handle the “opioid crisis” by administering the death penalty to “high level drug traffickers.” What’s the why and how of that? Well, as reported by a prominent source of news and blather, CNN Politics,

Trump told an audience in Pennsylvania this month that "a drug dealer will kill 2,000, 3,000, 5,000 people during the course of his or her life" and not be punished as much as a murderer.

"Thousands of people are killed or their lives are destroyed, their families are destroyed. So you can kill thousands of people and go to jail for 30 days," Trump said. "They catch a drug dealer, they don't even put them in jail."

I can’t help noticing Trump’s switch from the acceptable “his or her” to the horrible “them” (referent: a — i.e., one — drug dealer), which shows that he doesn’t understand grammar. As we’ve seen, he’s not the only one. But the real atrocity is the ideas he’s conveying. Talk about fake news! First we have the glib assertion that single sellers of drugs kill thousands. “How many thousands, Mr. Trump?” “Oh, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000. Is that enough to make my argument? I’ll give you more if you want.” Later we see that drug dealers aren’t put in jail. My modest research on law enforcement (please buy my book, The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison, Yale University Press, and ask your library to buy it as well) has uncovered a few cases of drug dealers who are in jail — a multitude of cases, in fact.

The worst childishness is the premise that these non-facts are supposed to support, which is the idea that drug dealers are responsible for destroying the live of victims and their families. If I’m drinking myself to death, the guy on the other side of the counter in the liquor store is not my murderer. He is not destroying my family, as 19th-century prohibitionists would maintain. If I die of drink, I am the one responsible. If my family suffers, I am the one who caused the suffering. And if Trump believes so much in the death penalty (which honesty compels me to state that I do also, though without Trump’s touching faith in its pharmacological efficacy), shouldn’t he be advocating that the consumers of illegal drugs be executed? That would solve the whole problem.

“How many thousands, Mr. Trump?” “Oh, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000. Is that enough to make my argument? I’ll give you more if you want.”

Let’s go back to Dr. Rosenberg’s idea about building bridges instead of walls. Intelligent communication is a bridge. Rosenberg’s opaquely politicized language is a wall. The intransigence of virtually all government agencies about revealing, well, anything about their operations — that’s another wall. The nation’s incessant, interminable investigations — those are walls, too.

But then we have the bridge builders, the Trumps and Clintons and McCabes and Brennans, ad infinitum, busily constructing their monuments of words — things built of twaddle and government jobs, unsupported by fact or logic. These projects have been going on for a long time. Now, thanks to the rank stupidity of the architects, everyone can see that they don’t work. The bridges are down. Knowing that, maybe we can start to pick up the scattered stones of our language and build some real bridges.

About this Author

Stephen Cox is editor of Liberty, and a professor of literature at the University of California San Diego. His recent books include The Big House: Image and Reality of the American Prison and American Christianity: The Continuing Revolution. Newly published is Culture and Liberty, a selection of works by Isabel Paterson.